Meet Family Nanny, a two-foot-seven, 55-pound robot that can talk, email, text, detect gas leaks, and run around on its two wheels for eight hours on a single two-hour charge.

It'll make great chatty company for the elderly while it relays vital stats back to health monitoring systems. In case of emergencies such as a gas leak, the Family Nanny will alert the owner via text and email.

Not bad for ¥10,000 ($1,465), we'd say, but we'll remain skeptical on its chatting skills until it launches -- supposedly sometime around 2015.